Rolling Music Writers' Thread

I wonder how much of it is just down to circumstance and luck. I mean: writing for the AMG when I did meant that as time went on I kept hearing from more and more people who had read my work and, in a number of cases, had said they discovered many bands as a result, that what was 'just' my words intrigued people and meant something. I still get occasional comments on those fronts, so in that regard I've been lucky enough to get a sense of validation, for lack of a better word. I don't feel my work is deathless, but knowing that it connected with others at a particular time and (virtual) place is enough.

"Over the course of 1977 and ’78 I attended concerts by, among others: Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Griffin, Woody Shaw, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and The Art Ensemble of Chicago."

that there's an edumacation.

"it just feels like shit isnt moving, theres no sense of a 'conversation,' just a lot of ppl being mad"

there are lots of little conversations everywhere.

the internet makes me not want to read music writing at all. that's the truth of it.

I'm still adjusting to how disposable music content is these days. Publications used to print reviews with great authority, as if they were the final word. They were literally archived, and re-printed year after year. They were written so you could go back to them.

Now many reviews (to the extend publications even run reviews) are designed to grab clicks by commenting on "the conversation" or whatever the outrage or hastag of the week is. They're takes that are intended to look like they're original or even contrarian, even though they're clearly intended to square with the value system of their perceived readers. And it does work for grabbing clicks, but the content ages horribly because of it.

The other challenge, mostly unrelated, is for whatever reason readers seem less interested in ever in curated recommendations. People don't want to read about bands/artists they've never heard about

just looking at the gig listings in the village voice when i was a kid was powerful and overwhelming. i don't know what i would be like if i were growing up now. the too muchness. i would probably just retreat into one of those smaller conversations on the web. i suppose it would have been nice to have people to talk to about stuff i liked when i was a kid.

i guess reading reviews felt like talking to people about back when i was a kid, though of course w/bangs or christgau it was one sided conversation

about music

"People don't want to read about bands/artists they've never heard about"

the RIYL generation has VERY specific likes/dislikes. they do not want surprises. but maybe that has always been true. people like comfort.

it did feel like a conversation. the letters in Creem were the best. the letters in most magazines. except comic books. those people could drive you nuts.

x-post

i still feel like more people could DIY it and make some money? maybe? there is the youtube route but that's not for everybody. but just a cool website. doesn't cost much. what do people even read online? pitchfork and...uh.....which is my point. advertising. spotify links. whatever. i'm no financial genius. it takes some doing though.

it just seems weird that websites are dead. spotify deaded everything. someone did.

I mean I for one feel that my work is deathless, in that there is no point at which a review is sufficiently old that no one is going to send me hate mail for it anymore

have things ever been worse? obviously the answer is "no, but you've never" but I can't think of a time in the past... 7-8 years or so with a worse ratio of people who want me dead (via twitter and email, sometimes in those words) to people who want me not-dead (via payment for work)

The convo kinda veered from this original post, but some of this unfortunately seems unique to the experiences of a woman music writer. Like, I don't get all that much hate on Twitter as a guy, aside from the occasional band-orchestrated flood if they don't like a review I write (I had one band tweet at me to go fuck myself, then for the next three days my timeline was all retweets and likes telling me to go fuck myself). But that's pretty tame and just on Twitter—I don't get emails telling me that, and I'm guessing most of the guys itt don't get many hate emails, either.

And yeah, the idea of getting hate mail for a very old review. Never, never, never happens to guys, I don't think.

My relationship with music writing and views on it would be INFINITELY different if I were routinely getting threatening mail for shit I wrote years ago. I just don't have the stomach for that.

Writing about music if you're a minority is as bad as it's ever been.

at least fifteen years ago if I applied the queer or Latino lens there weren't 600 posts on social media and another 600 columns and "think pieces" condemning homophobia and racism. Thanks to the flood of such pieces, segments of the readership for rockcrit tunes out in 2017.

I get hate mail from time to time. Mostly when I write about female pop stars as if they have some sort of agency w regards to the product they put out though.

I don't know that the hate mail I get is different from anyone else's, but the proportions are different. the whole thing about hearing more and more people say they've read my work does not really happen for me; if anything, it's less and less. it's mostly a reflection on me, of course, but the situation still exists

Re the difficulty in covering new bands, as discussed by the Guardian ex-editor above: the main way I've gotten around that is by writing more previews---so many bands make almost all their money on the road, as ever---and the main way to distinguish between them, if any, is by making the preview mainly a microview of current product---there being only so many ways you can rehash the career saga of most 23-year-olds, however gifted---especially if they keep coming back to town (lotta bands, yeah, but when it's five on the bill at the death metal bar, with some of them sitting in the alley between sets to appease the fire marshall, you do tend to see some familiar faces and backstories two or three times a school year---of course I'm talking about collegetown alt-weeklies, nothing useful for Guardian-type coverage.) Given about 100 words a shot, it can work---compression has its own fascination...

who says they have more readers now? i think i probably have less readers now than any time in the last like ten years despite being moderately more 'successful'

I haven't done any writing for six years but it actually started a few years before that. I was able to survive into my mid 30s working at an independent record store and writing about music because Columbus is a cheap place to live and I had meager needs and I was always able to write for a local weekly newspaper (I did so in Raleigh before Columbus, I eventually was editing the entertainment section of a weekly newspaper that tied in with Ohio State) which was consistent work as well as international metal magazines and the odd piece in something more mainstream.

However in 2007 I got a gig at a metal record company however this meant relocating to a new city. The editors at the local weekly newspapers here literally ignored every email I sent and phone call I made. Combined with music magazines drying up and the 50+ hours working at the label cutting into the hours I could have spent hustling up writing assignments, my writing trickled away.

Not long afterwards there was writing on the wall that my job was going away (that writing being all of my duties at work were going away). Right around that time my state legalized poker in casinos and I was able to jump into a job as a poker dealer. I quit the record company just in time to avoid being laid off but suddenly I was making well more than twice as much money doing something I enjoyed (I like poker).

It's funny, the last thing I had published was after I started working at the casino. Out of the blue William Goodman from Spin.com emailed me. He was supposedly given my name as a Philly writer who could review a rejuvenated Glassjaw concert. To date that is the last publicized music criticism I ever did. (Oddly enough it's still online.)

It's funny because I was paid $150 to review the show. It was a day off at the casino but it occurred to me that getting $150 to review a concert was probably pretty high for what I would get from most outlets, and if I had to take a night off work to do it, I would have lost money since even a bad day dealing cards for 8 hours was netting me at least a third more than that. It kind of solidified my decision.

Well, next week I am getting something published for the first time since then. It's for a friend and former editor's webzine. I won't be getting paid but I am hoping that it might help offset the costs of being a consumer (last year I spent $3,713.17 on music, with about $2,600 of that on CDs and tickets to concerts). I am working days now for the first time in years so my nights are free and I will try and do this again. Hopefully I won't suck too badly at it.

Anyway, this thread popping up now as I am nervously taking steps towards writing about music again made me want to share my story. I wonder if anyone has any advice? Or assignments? :P

i think its fine if people can do stuff forever, but there is a part of me that thinks its kinda cool if people move on and then younger people take up where they left off. i like the evolution of ideas and opinion. there's something to be said for someone putting their heart and soul into a fanzine for a year or two and then just...stopping. and then other people do the same thing. the conversation keeps going.

this guy i know put on a year's worth of shows at my store. 50 shows? it was too much! it was crazy. but memorable. and that was it. one year and done. and after that other people did stuff in other places and he rented a space and did a series of shows in one space for a summer and on and on. permanence is overrated. maybe that's why i'm not a big fan of reunion shows.

(not really talking about people who write for a living but more the part-time/freelance/love of it kinda people as far as crit/writing goes.)

I write for Burning Ambulance whenever I can. Sometimes that's two pieces in a week, sometimes it's nothing for a month.

I like having columns. It's a guaranteed deadline I know about at the beginning of every month. Right now I have a monthly column for Stereogum, and a periodic column for The Wire (not every month, more like every two or three months).

I don't like pitching, because the stuff I want to write about, very few people care about, and the stuff people are willing to publish, I mostly don't care about. The only places I pitch now are places I have a track record with: The Wire (articles and reviews), Down Beat (articles), and Bandcamp (articles). Most of my income currently comes from other, writing-adjacent work.

I couldn't imagine having to crank out 500 words in, like, two hours whenever Beyoncé releases a new video. That must be pure fucking hell, even if you actually like Beyoncé.

it's just a job. writing about beyonce on deadline. digging ditches. it's work.

i've dug some enduring ditches

I have dug the ditch of my life

I have measured my ditches with coffee spoons.

i like this thread.

also "500 words in, like, two hours whenever Beyoncé releases a new video" -- when I wrote music news I fucking wished I had two hours, the expected turnaround is more like 15 minutes

These are fairly dire times, indeed. Actually, for the last two years it's kinda felt like that, though the rot started setting in 7-8 years ago. We were all born a bit too late, honestly.

My dream for the near future is that, after I move back to Baltimore in a few months, I can find a better paying day job than the one I have now, and...just kinda pull away from freelance. I mean, I like it. I like reviewing albums, I like discovering new artist, I like all that, but freelance once felt novel and "extra" and supplemental income, and now it's something needed to survive in an era of scraping assignment scarcity, so now it's exhausting and anxiety-inducing more often than not. Don't want to feel dependent on it.
Also, honestly, I'm old and a bit sick of how much of an arms race this game feels like now.

To Scott's point above, I guess: In 5-10 years I'll probably drop freelance to a bare minimum and go back to solo zine-ing.

A classical music critic offers another perspective.

the madlibs thing she mentions is basically why i resolved to stop writing reviews regularly, i just started having a more-negative-than-usual relationship with my own work (and only after i made that decision did i figure out how much i'd come to depend on reviews as a regular source of income, lol)

there is a part of me that thinks its kinda cool if people move on and then younger people take up where they left off. i like the evolution of ideas and opinion.

Agreed. How many opinions can one person hold about music anyway? Surely there comes a point when critics are staging the same arguments they've made countless times elsewhere. And that should be the point when you bail.

Aside from the Wire I rarely read any professional writing about music anymore. It's a shame, I used to hoover up so much stuff, but I just don't find very much inspiring right now. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that people who could write intelligently about music are too intelligent to want to pursue it in the current climate.

Being let go from the AMG essentially meant the end of regular reviewing on my part -- after almost fifteen years of steady work I had AMG writing down to a science, perhaps to a fault. I tried to treat the standard 300 word review approach as a series of miniatures -- I might not be able to say everything, but I could say a lot, and well, once I was locked into an album. At the same time I recognized my own ('particularly fine') crutches over the moons, and felt a little tired of that particular voice I created. Losing the small but reliable income was a bit of a stretch for the next few months -- private matters but I could have used it during a rough period personally -- but once things stabilized I can't say I missed what had been a bit of a grind. The downside, though, was that I missed essentially being forced to listen to at least ten new albums every couple of weeks if not more -- 'forced' sounding bad, but I ended up hearing a lot of people I wouldn't necessarily have otherwise, and there were always many diamonds in the rough. Now (per my flood comment earlier) the amount of music I regularly receive is even greater, but the time is less and less to hand -- I used to catch up on listening at work at UCI, and while I can do it here as well it's less convenient -- and since I've mostly now settled into feature writing of one form or another thanks to the general changes in the writing market as many have noted, any reviewing as such would have to be on my own account. No bad thing as a mental exercise at all, but honestly it is mostly a mental exercise than a written one, and if something really excites me I would generally rather seek to interview the act in question for a story. (As for larger theoretical ideas or reflections on the state of things, they come as they do.)

(I wrote all that and then note Position's riff on Scott's point re moving on -- I suspect there's an element of that at play too. I've made my general cases, now I'm looking for standout examples, and not necessarily going into my own aesthetic while doing so, though as ever it remains a happy slumgullion, aiming to take in music across the board.)

I miss reading the Wire. Need to find a relatively close bookstore where I can get it on the regular (or just subscribe, already).

And Ned, I feel a lot of what you're saying. Honestly, I listen to less music with each passing year, and tend to spend the most time with albums that really excite me.

Here's a contrarian opinion: I love writing about music more than ever and still get paid to do it, and it's a great thrill when a stranger emails or leaves a comment on my blog. I've never pretended the market for rockcrit or filmcrit was larger than a coterie, but unlike the pre-net days, there's always a chance a kid in Poland will disinter a review I've happily forgotten filed in 2004 and write to say it helped her think about Band X – in fact this happened to me last week.

I still get comments on my AMG work in particular, from people who say it really helped them get into a number of bands. I ascribe this to a certain luck on two levels -- the AMG's continued existence, meaning the content is still out there, still heavily linked to via Wikipedia, etc., and that I had a chance, when the site's content was still ramping up in the 1990s, to write about a number of notable acts who already had a certain cachet. I may consider my own efforts to be reflective of whatever time/mindset I was in -- the ones I'm now most ambivalent about would be my Swans pieces -- but generally speaking I stand by the work and people continue to enjoy it. Works for me.

I see things I wrote for Burning Ambulance pop up on Twitter years later - there was a big spike in interest in a John Coltrane piece recently - and it's fun. But lately I'm searching for stories that will allow me to have an interesting experience while writing them. Being sent to Helsinki back in December to cover a jazz festival, for example. A few years earlier I might have said no to that; this time I said yes, and had a fantastic time.

I just wrote obit pieces for my local weekly on go-go producer Maxx Kidd, and on rockabilly and more guitarist Evan Johns. The Washington Post has not run anything on them, nor have other locally based websites, so my articles are getting shared around a bit.

I write about young living musicians too.

Here's a contrarian opinion: I love writing about music more than ever

wtf

nerd

I just write obituaries for musicians who haven't died yet. And then I wait to share them....

Happy Halloween!

Sorry if I'm coming across as overly gloomy here. It's not all bad and nightmarish, obviously, and getting to cover Trip Metal Festival for SPIN last year was a career-high thrill. (Also getting to cover Ende Tymes in 2014 for Village Voice.)

I think I used to have 3 main hopes when writing about music, which for a long time I did about one night a week: that I might connect some music to new listeners, that I might put some music in some interesting context, and that I might demonstrate by example some aspect of how to sustain curiosity and enthusiasm about new music in your own listening life.

It's now my actual day-job to type into a computer in order to try to connect music to new listeners, put music in interesting contexts, and foster curiosity and enthusiasm in listeners directly in their own listening lives. My old column connected thousands of people to hundreds of artists. My job at Spotify helps to connect about 100 million listeners to about a million artists. So that's pretty cool.

There are a few obvious caveats. As a column-writer I was trying to find fans for artists I liked myself. As a programmer, my personal tastes are irrelevant. As a column-writer I was typing prose for people, and now I'm mostly typing code for computers. So if those aspects are integral to you, then the two jobs may not seem related at all. But on the other hand, the pay is better, and where writing reviews actually slowed down my own personal discovery process, working on programmatic music-discovery tools accelerates it.

*chorus of boos*

nerd

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson),

Description, not criticism.

it's been about five years since I wrote regularly anywhere and in that time I've grappled with feeling a void that writing used to fill and yet also being forced to acknowledge that a not-insubstantial part of my satisfaction with it was derived from having an audience of at least some size, whether that was a daily newspaper or a popular website. hence I haven't been able to motivate myself to start back writing for its own sake even if (essentially) no one was reading. in my current position I can't think of a better strategy than what Alfred has done with his blog, but he's worked damn hard to build an audience/community as well as a voice that distinguishes him from a million other people with a blog. what i'm saying is that if I ever do start writing regularly again it'll probably just look like a knock-off of HtV.

thanks, evol :)